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Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire | 
| Author: Alex Abella
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 16719
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 0151010811
Dewey Decimal Number: 355.070973
EAN: 9780151010813
ASIN: 0151010811
Publication Date: May 12, 2008
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Product Description
The first-ever popular history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, Soldiers of Reason is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind American government for sixty years. Born in the wake of World War II as an idea factory to advise the air force on how to wage and win wars, RAND quickly became the creator of America’s anti-Soviet nuclear strategy. A magnet for the best and the brightest, its ranks included Cold War luminaries such as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation and unquestionably created Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.” In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts became McNamara’s Whiz Kids and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated actors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND’s greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led transformation of our social and economic system but also unleashed a resurgence of precisely the forces whose existence it denied— religion, patriotism, tribalism. With Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abella has rewritten the history of America’s last half century and cast a new light on our problematic present.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 RAND Still Awaits its History June 24, 2008
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
A frustrating book. RAND clearly deserves a history and a cold war post mortem but this book isn't it. It reads a bit like a summary of interviews strung together with a muddled view of history and context. One would have hoped the text could have sorted through the hype, spin and fact of who this firm was and their impact on U.S. policy. Instead we get random vignettes of some of the more colorful personalities with no real insight. Hopefully someone will do a better job.
 author of reason? June 19, 2008
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
Soldiers Of Reason may have been okay if it were the biography of Wohlstetter. As it is, it resembles someone who has visited the Louvre for five days and writes a book about what Europe is like.
To consider Wolfowitz and Perle as RANDites is absurd. C Rice came a bit closer, but not much. Rumsfeld was on the Board but only on the Board, and that was a long time ago.
There was never a fist fight in any manangement meeting. Shapley (a member of the National Academy of Science) and Belman were mathemeticians, not an economist and a physicist. The correct decription of RAND by Pravda was The Academy of Death and Destruction. These are minor errors and are perhaps to be expected in any book. It always is a plus, however, for authors to do their homwork.
The author makes RAND look like a group of wild eyed hawks bent on death and destruction without a thought for human lives or social consequences.. An assemblage of Dr Strangeloves. To imply that ethics and morals was a luxury that the researchers couldn't afford or chose not to address is an insult to the vast majority of RAND researchers.
My guess is that most of the real RANDites will gasp in horror at what is portrayed of the organization. Yes, a great deal of emphasis was on the cold war and how to fight it, but also how to avoid it. To imply that our current policy in the Middle East is a direct result of RAND is another absurdity. There may be many who have taken what they wish to further from some of the studies performed at RAND, but there are different interpretations and indeed different studies to the contrary. Those mentioned above as RANDites who never were, may have been influenced by Wohlstetter but their work should not be represented as part of the history of RAND and their philosophies differ considerably from the majority of RANDites of that era.
No mention was made of the System Development Division, comprised almost entirely of psychologists who studied much of what the author says never happened at RAND. The Division spun off and formed the System Development Corporation and rapidly outgrew the parent. How could someone doing a so called history of RAND not include this?
No mention was made of the tremendous contribution in Artificial Intelligence which had much of its beginning at RAND involving Newell, Shaw and Simon as well as Minsky from MIT who was a consultant.
The entire computing field including programming (linear, dynamic and heuristic) perhaps was furthered by RAND as much or more than any other organization including IBM. The first professional computing societies were originally headed by people such as Paul Armer, Willis Ware and others from RAND
Computing as we know it today was very largley a result of the early efforts at RAND.
The really historic contributions made by the Information Sciences Department and the Mathematics Department (later merged into one) were not mentioned.
But no, we hear almost only of how Herman and Albert and few others did such damage with their concept of rational choice.
Studies at RAND included the first (outside of the Secret Service ) study and design of Presidential protection and RAND played a key role in the security of the 1984 Olympics.
Machine translation and was largely inaugurated at RAND.
Tom Lincoln began some of the very first definitive work on the treatment of leukemia.
Much work was done to avoid unauthorized lanching of nuclear weapons and assisstance was given to the DOD in establishing what at the time was known as The Human Reliability Program to ensure the behavioral soundness of those with access to those weapons. Safeguards such as the launch enabling system was of real concern within the corporation and contributions were made to the Air Force to develop such a system.
Cost analysis and a myriad of other novel sophisticated management approaches in the various commands were presented and adopted by the Air Force.
The Logistics Department made many substantial contributions to the Air Force.
Many such studies resulted in almost monumental savings of tax dollars.
The role RAND played in counterterrorism was hardly recognized for its significance, particularly its role in counter nuclear terrorism. Brian Jenkins could well be called the father of counterterrorism in this country, not only in his and his team's continued studies and analysis
but in giving the rest of the various agencies (starting, at first, with the Department of State) a jump start in combatting this threat.
The New York City debacle was fairly well covered. The eight or so people who first presenteed the concept to the Mayor (not the other way around) at a breakfast at Gracie Mansion envisioned the same type of atmosphere that was enjoyed at RAND Santa Monica (and Washington). That was not to be, and the head of the effort was not a researcher of the parent corporation. Many thought that this doomed it from the beginning. The effort seemed to be more of a job shop than research. And while it was an experiment in what might be accomplished with a RAND- like approach to the problems and compexities of running a large city, it failed.
Almost no mention was made in the book to the contributions to the Health field. And there have been many.
There are countless other studies too numerous to mention, and contributions of a much more benign nature that Rand addressed that were not covered in the book.
Instead, we read continuously all about a few people (admittedly influencal) many not ever even RANDites, and get a picture that is certainly not representative of this great corporation. To do so sadly did a very major diservice to the RAND corporation and the many researchers who will remember its history in a completely different way.
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 Soldiers of Reason June 14, 2008
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a rare book to study an influential think tank in American history. There are many think tanks with great influence in American foreign policy especially after the World War II and during the Cold War; however, there are not many books about them.
For those interested in the establishment of American military and foreign policy, this is a must-read book. For those intersted in Amerian history, this is also must-read book. You do not have to make a judgement about the influence of RAND; however, it is true that the creation of RAND help strengthening the power of United States of America in the world.
 Important and Thought-Provoking... May 21, 2008
19 out of 32 found this review helpful
I came across Alex Abella's fascinating book in the LAX airport newsstand, moments before boarding my $230 Virgin America flight to Washington. After my late friend Kevin's disturbing RAND conference room memorial service, I simply had to read it cover-to-cover on the flight. It took me until somewhere over Ohio. I really could not put the book down. The desire to reduce all questions to a matter of numbers was one I had come across last week in my late father's 1941 diary. It turned out we had moved into a home of one of the the founders of RAND--J. Richard Goldstein--when we arrived in Santa Monica.
Coincidentally, a high school friend had been the son of RAND researcher Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. The cousin of someone I know worked for RAND after leaving the CIA. The girlfriend of another cousin of someone I know worked at RAND while on leave from the State Department. When I saw the book in the bookstore, I realized that I had known practically nothing about the "mother of all think-tanks." From the book I found out that the Hudson Institute was a bastard child of RAND, set up after Herman Kahn left the mother ship. The Albert Wohlstetter room at AEI is named after a RAND guru. And almost everyone who is anyone in Washington these days--especially the architects of America's Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires--seem to have some sort of RAND connection.
Yet so far as I know, there had been no book about RAND, until this. It explained a great deal, and I recommend it highly. It is about the possibilities--and limits--of operations research and systems analysis. Reading "Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire" helped me better understand the sudden and tragic death of my friend...
Must reading for anyone interested in the ways of Washington, or what President Eisenhower (apparently with RAND in mind) called "the military-industrial complex."
Cool book on RAND and American foreign policy May 9, 2008
9 out of 16 found this review helpful
Great introduction to Rand history - the author doesn't get bogged down in high theories or boring political history. This book is easy to read and though he saves his punch for the end (basically that Rand's love affair with "rational choice theory" pretty much defined the second half of the 20th century, including cold war policy and doomsday plans, Reaganomics, so yes, the theory is really important, but "rational choice" totally fails to be politically sensible or human, pretty much), it is just plain fascinating to see how many fingers in how many pies the Rand (Research And No Development - hilarious!) octopus has had, and how many contemporary figures in Iraq, including Richard Perle, Donald Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Condi Rice, have had ties to Rand.
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